Iceland Votes On Closer EU Ties Amid Sovereignty Fears

Someone in Iceland is paid for owning a right to catch fish, or a right to keep foreign fish out, without either right requiring that its holder herd a sheep, mend a net, or once put to sea. The Icelandic quota system, distributing shares of the catch according to a vessel’s history rather than its present labour, has for decades allowed men who no longer fish to lease their entitlement to men who do, drawing an income from the sea while contributing nothing to what is drawn from it. This is the arrangement that the referendum, in its quiet way, disturbs.

The question I have always put to any claim of property is not whether it is old, or customary, or defended with patriotic feeling, but whether it corresponds to a function performed. Ownership earns its moral title by service rendered; where the title survives the service, we have not property in any defensible sense but a tribute extracted from those who do the work. Icelandic farmers, watching this referendum with evident anxiety, fear that a step closer to the European Union will strip away the tariffs and subsidies that have made their small, cold-country holdings viable against Danish and French competition on a common market. That fear deserves to be taken seriously, for genuine agricultural function - the maintenance of land, the production of food in conditions no market left alone would reward - is precisely the kind of function protection is meant to preserve.

But the fishing quota holders are a different case, and it would be a failure of analysis to treat farmer and quota-lessor as making the same claim merely because both invoke sovereignty. The farmer who tills the same exposed acre his grandfather tilled, and asks that his labour not be undercut by continental subsidy, is asserting a functional claim, however imperfectly the tariff realises it. The quota-lessor who has not wet a boot in a decade, and draws his return from a certificate rather than a catch, is asserting nothing of the kind; he has converted access to a common resource into a private annuity, and no amount of talk about national waters or ancestral fjords converts that annuity back into service.

What the referendum forces into the open, then, is not simply a question of Brussels against Reykjavik, but a domestic question Iceland has for decades preferred not to ask of itself: whether its own quota system already resembles the acquisitive arrangements its independence was meant to guard against. A vote framed as resistance to a distant geopolitical threat may in practice decide only whether the rent presently collected by Icelandic quota holders continues to be collected by Icelandic quota holders, or is renegotiated under a wider common fisheries policy answering to Brussels instead. Sovereignty, in that light, is not self-evidently a moral good; it depends entirely on whose functionless claim it happens to be defending.

The fisherman mending his net on the quay at dawn is not the figure this referendum is really about. The figure it is about sits at a desk in Reykjavik, holding paper that entitles him to fish he will never see, waiting to learn only which flag will honour the entitlement.